It's a function of lingering ingorance and misaligned incentives. We have the technology and the institutions that can prevent the majority of this damage, despite our large numbers.
I am genuinely curious. Clean energy systems exist, but they are either expensive, restricted and dangerous to proliferate or expensive, inefficient and inconvenient.
What institutions exist that can make clean energy palatable to all the human societies that require it for their survival—at-scale, that they are all ignoring?
Leaving energy aside, what other powerful means of doing good to ecosystems as a whole, are they simply ignoring? Is there any quantification of the damage?
I am most certainly not trying to attack your position. I pretty much believe the same things you said. But we should have these answers documented. Is there a single source for these things on the web?
He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.
He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activities, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.
Five culture types based on food getting technology: 1 Foraging; 2 Hunter-gatherer; 3 Agricultural (cities); 5 Pastoral (Animal herding); 5 Industrial
Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."
(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...
Holmgrin's scenarios:
1 Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)
2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
3 Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.
4 "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.
"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.
Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.
The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects.
> 2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
Ok, we have something like 450 nuclear reactors globally. IIRC bumping that number up 10 times would give us roughly two times our current global energy usage (ie fuels and electricity).
That's a margin that could reasonably address energy requirements for synthetic fuel production & delivery, sustain the additional energy we want to use for cleaner but energy demanding electrical processes in industry, and arguably put us on footing to end global poverty. Atomic process heat is wicked-good for desalination, critical to avoid water-related wars. "Next gen" tech (from the 70s...), conceivably could let us think about replenishing continental aquifers, and all round have enough energy to continue exploring space. All without any social engineering or major lifestyle or geopolitical reshaping.
I'm a big fan of solar, but our global solar energy budget has some tricky hurdles before we get to 200% current global energy usage. And I'm not enthused about anything that requires a centrally managed government (that doesn't exist today), managing life and death. It sounds scary and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
It seems that all these points assume naturally unlimited and indefinite population growth, but it is projected that the world population will reach a certain point and then level off (see https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth for some charts).
The basic argument is that increasing the education of women leads to fewer children. You can already see this in developed countries which are actually starting to exhibit negative population growth (e.g. Japan).
Sorry it's been a long day, so I don't have the energy to write much.
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
Ideally, this should be a multi-national effort led by all the wealthy countries. They should also create investment funds to help more quickly developing nations move past lower tech, harfmul energy sources (need a lot oversight here to make sure there isn't any economic exploitation).
I'm not super well-researched, but there does seem to be a lot of effective, actionable solutions that we can start today. The above are just a small sample.
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
This was the basis for the Kyoto Protocol [1] in 1997, which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions by making organizations pay for a license to emit greenhouse gases. It even put most of the burden on developed nations, as you suggest.
Now, you may argue that the costs for licenses were not steep enough, or that the resulting emissions trading market diluted the effectiveness of the regulation, or that the US' refusal to ratify it makes effectively a failed attempt -- but what you propose has been tried before.
Understand. Thanks for stating some options - but like you said, it’s not 100% in the hands of the currently developing economies... but it would appear that a lot of commentary hates on them for being the polluters right now.
What institutions exist that can make clean energy palatable to all the human societies that require it for their survival—at-scale, that they are all ignoring?
Leaving energy aside, what other powerful means of doing good to ecosystems as a whole, are they simply ignoring? Is there any quantification of the damage?
I am most certainly not trying to attack your position. I pretty much believe the same things you said. But we should have these answers documented. Is there a single source for these things on the web?